The invention has been developed primarily for use in relation to display stands, display shelving and cabinets, shop fittings, interior architecture and design, interior facades, partitioning systems, and the like. It will be appreciated, however, that the invention is not limited to these particular fields of use.
Sandwich panels are well known and have found widespread use as structural materials in aeronautical and numerous other applications. The panels generally comprise a relatively thick core formed from a low density material such as foam, sandwiched between relatively thin but stronger outer skins. As is well known to those skilled in the art, such constructions have been found to produce excellent stiffness to weight characteristics.
Because of these properties, sandwich panels are generally designed for structural applications and as such, are normally intended to be as light as possible, and as stiff as possible to resist bending and buckling. In bending, most known sandwich panels tend to deform entirely elastically, or to exhibit only a relatively small amount of plastic deformation or yield before the ultimate strength of the composite material is reached, at which point either the core or one or both of the skins rupture and fail catastrophically. Thus, the panels tend to break rather than bend, when loaded beyond their limits of strength.
For this reason, most known sandwich panels have not been able to be permanently bent or cold formed into desired shapes and consequently, the manufacture of non-planar structures has required discrete panel sections to be butt-jointed, glued, or otherwise mechanically fastened to form the desired configuration. These processes are inefficient, labor intensive, time consuming and expensive. Even more importantly, however, the resultant loss of structural integrity at the joints makes largely redundant the potential strength characteristics which the sandwich panel might otherwise have been able to provide.
Some metal skinned panels have not been subject to these problems to the same extent. However, these suffer from other disadvantages in terms of excessive cost and weight. They are also subject to a tendency for the metal skins to yield under minimal surface pressure to produce visually and structurally undesirable surface distortion.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a composite panel construction which overcomes or ameliorates at least some of these disadvantages of the prior art.